As reported in this thread from the Linux Kernel Mailing List, seems that the ACPI support is somehow broken, and this causes a thermal shutdown nearly immediately after the boot process has finished.

Booting the laptop with the 2.6.25 kernel still works fine, except that the only connectivity available is the wireless one - the built-in ethernet stopped to work - so I'll just wait for some kind of updated package, hoping it will hit the repositories before Lenny gets released :)

Update

Loading the 2.6.26 kernel with the noacpi option seems to work fine as well, and the ethernet connection works again.

[2008-09-12] Solved

Install the following packages:

• madwifi-tools
• eeepc-acpi-modules-2.6.26-1-686

This solves the issue, at least on my EeePC.

Prerequisites

It seems that only JDK is needed to get things working, so a simple

$ aptitude install sun-java5-sdk

will suffice.

Installing JBoss

The following instructions are just a compact rewrite of the information found in this useful post: JBoss on Debian quickstart.

$ cd /opt
$ unzip /home/adotti/jboss-4.2.2.GA.zip
$ mv jboss-4.2.2.GA jboss
$ jboss/bin/run.sh -b 192.168.10.13

A lot of logging output will flood your terminal... as soon as you see the following line:

INFO  [Server] JBoss (MX MicroKernel)
      [4.2.2.GA (build:SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_2_GA date=200710221139)] Started in 50s:564ms

you can point your browser to http://192.168.10.13:8080/ (the address specified after the -b option) and check if everything is working as expected.

Usually, getting rid of these monstrous sized logs is the quickest way to get some free space back, but I am not inclined to delete logs. A better approach, in my opinion, is to force a log rotation, which usually led, more or less, to the same result.

On a Debian system you can trigger the following cron script manually:

$ /etc/cron.daily/sysklogd

and your system logs get immediately rotated.

When I have to upgrade the hard disk of my system, I usually plug the new hdd in the machine, partition it, copy the data, install the boot loader, remove the old disk and reboot.

But, what if there are some oddities that prevent your boot loader to be manually installed on the new disk, and you don't have time/will/opportunity to sort out the issue? Well, this is just another way of performing the disk upgrade, at least with debian.

1. plug the new disk into the machine and unplug all other disks (if present)
2. boot with the Debian net install cd
3. install a minimal debian on the new disk (this step allows partitioning and installs the boot loader)
4. plug the old disk(s) back and reboot the system using the old installation; go into single user mode
5. wipe the newly created file systems and copy all data to the new disk
6. edit the files that need to (if any)
7. remove the old disk and reboot

Having a B-plan is a must. With unix it is easy :)

Some days ago I had the need to rip a cd to load the tracks on my portable player. It seems that the version of cdparanoia included in etch (currently 3.10+debian~pre0-4) is broken and unable to rip anything. The only working solution was to downgrade the package to the version included in sarge.

Final steps for my etch upgrade. On the test machine I just had to perform two tasks to tune the system.

Filesystem tuning

I added the dir_index flag to all non volatile filesystems. The dir_index option force the use of hashed b-trees to speed up lookups in large directories.

$ tune2fs -O +dir_index /dev/hda1

the previous operation was repeated for all filesystems.

Old kernels removal

I used aptitude to remove any old 2.4 kernel installed on the system.

I got gargoyle, the etch upgraded testing box, ready from a week or so; it was time to do the job.

I just followed the etch release notes step by step. For the impatient - remembering that this a standard sarge headless box - this is what I did:

• changed the sources for apt
• updated the package list (aptitude update)
• performed an upgrade (aptitude upgrade)
• installed intitrd-tools to get libc6 and locales updated (other things will be updated as well)
• performed a dist upgrade (aptitude dist-upgrade)
• edited any configuration file that needs to be fixed or updated
• updated the package list again
• removed obsolete packages
• rerun lilo (/sbin/lilo -v)
• rebooted

Etched :)

Before following the step outlined above, keep in mind that you might have to perform some more or different steps, depending on your setup. Definitely read the release notes!

You have been warned...

I took the chance of a quiet Saturday morning to start testing the upgrade path from sarge to etch. The target machine was gargoyle, a FTP server with a minimum set of packages installed, and it was chosen to discover the most relevant problems I could encounter with the other boxes I own (my setups are quite similar).

The only mayor issue outlined in the release notes is the need to upgrade the kernel before the full upgrade takes place. The box run a 2.4.27 kernel, so I needed to upgrade to a 2.6.8 kernel. As far as I could test, the via_rhine driver shipped with the official debian kernel sources is broken, so I used a vanilla 2.6.8.1 kernel to have my D-Link network card working.

Now that everything is in place, I'm ready...

Se vi trovate a gestire diverse macchine, magari con configurazione hardware identica, oppure se qualcuna di esse è particolarmente datata - come mi capita abbastanza di frequente - converrete che avere la possibilità di compilare un kernel configurato secondo gusto altrove, e generare un pacchetto deb pronto per essere installato ovunque serva, è molto comodo.

Oltre che molto comodo è anche molto facile. Basta avere i sorgenti del kernel a portata di mano ed installare il pacchetto kernel-package.

Spacchettate i sorgenti del kernel:

$> tar jxvf kernel-source-2.4.27.tar.bz2

Configuratelo come più vi piace:

$> cd kernel-source-2.4.27/
$> make menuconfig

Compilate:

$> make-kpkg --revision 01 --append-to-version -adc kernel_image

A questo punto il vostro pacchetto è pronto per essere installato nel solito modo ovunque vi serva:

$> dpkg -i kernel-image-2.4.27-adc_01_i386.deb

Due note sulle opzioni che ho usato:

--revision

Imposta il revision number del kernel da compilare. Preferisco specificarlo a mano dato che il default altrimenti usato non mi piace.

--append-to-version

Imposta la variabile EXTRAVERSION nel Makefile del kernel. La valorizzo sempre, per fare in modo che ogni versione diversa del kernel abbia il proprio albero di moduli in /lib/modules/ (evitando così aggiunte e rimozioni incontrollate dopo ogni nuova compilazione).

Ci sono moltissime altre opzioni disponibili; vi consiglio caldamente di leggere la man page di make-kpkg.